Friday Aug 30, 2013

Today's blog is from one of our technical writers, John Francis, from the Service Delivery Platform (SDP) writing team. He was the documentation project lead for the most recent release of the Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper and shares information about the product and the docs below. John is relatively new to the our team - he started in March 2012. He has a fondness for electronic gadgets and Boston Terriers, and can be found in the shoe department at Nieman’s watching his wife shop most weekends. He has a keen sense of humor, which you'll soon experience. I hope you enjoy reading his blog!

Cheryl Lander, Oracle Communications InfoDev Senior Director

Thanks very much, Cheryl! By way of introduction, Oracle Communications Services Gatekeeper lets telecom service providers grant their partners access to myriad telecom network services via easy-to-use, standardized interfaces known as facades. Its feature set includes full partner and network control, finely grained service level agreement support, and almost unlimited extensibility potential, along with carrier grade reliability and scalability.

After more than a year of concerted development effort, on May 28th, 2013, Oracle released a comprehensive upgrade for Services Gatekeeper that provides the following enhancements:

As you can see from that list, the modest “dot one” version increment belies a wealth of expanded features and complexity, all of which it was incumbent upon SDP InfoDev to document.

Project Documentation Accomplishments

As often happens, because of the multiplicity of projects and responsibilities, InfoDev arrived a bit late in the development of Services Gatekeeper 5.1. In addition to the late start, the writing team faced the following challenges:

With a lead writer new to Oracle and Services Gatekeeper, the lead had to learn the CGBU InfoDev organization's enterprise documentation standards, and ramp up on the extensive processes devoted to delivering quality technical documentation.

Services Gatekeeper is a huge product with broad areas of functionality. It’s difficult to master some of the core concepts, let alone the entire product.

The documentation set has expanded over Gatekeeper’s decade plus service life. Writers had to carefully research the two thousand plus pages of documentation to identify which documents were affected by which features.

We’ve got only two hard-working editors, whose time is continually spoken for and whose schedules were at odds with Services Gatekeeper’s milestones.

Development goals were fluid during the course of the project with features prioritized and deprioritized on a regular basis.

We were able to mitigate those factors by assembling a team of veteran technical writers (along with one scrappy upstart) who were able to dig into the Services Gatekeeper documentation library, understand its scope, assimilate the new features and come up with a flexible documentation plan. As with all large scale, long term projects (this one spanned more than a year), we needed to remain agile, regularly interfacing with the development team, and trying to stay on top of the project. In addition, we counterbalanced the lack of editorial support by farming out our documentation to our willing colleagues for peer review.

Project Documentation Extended Accomplishments

At the beginning of the project, our goals were initially modest. We, of course, wanted to document all features, as well as provide editorial support for the two Javadoc systems that ship with Services Gatekeeper. As the project evolved, and the timeline expanded to encompass unforeseen obstacles and integrate late-breaking critical features, similarly, InfoDev expanded its scope. In the end, the team met the following additional expanded goals:

Created a new Security Guide per Oracle’s latest guidelines

Produced and delivered a revised and reorganized OAuth guide

Reviewed more than 650 Javadoc source files, making edits to approximately 195 of those

Worked extensively with the Portal team, not only on online help for the application but also on workflow reviews and bug hunting

Addressed more than thirty incidental documentation enhancement requests requested during the product lifecycle

Closed out bug backlogs from earlier versions and made it to GA with no outstanding issues

Our fantastic production team also enabled enhancements that required no effort from us, the most impressive of which were:

ePub and Mobi ereader formats, should you wish to review our documentation on your tablet or ereader

A much requested search feature, capable of searching our documents either at the library or single document level

And, finally, on a nerdy level, a new source control system (Subversion, or SVN) that enabled us to build our documents whenever our hearts desired

Future Plans for Services Gatekeeper Documentation

Naturally, time stands still for no software product, and Services Gatekeeper is no exception. Even as I write this, product management and development are in the planning stages for the next version, and InfoDev is no different. Some initial goals that we’re hoping to meet for the next version include:

Having the large (22 systems) documentation library reviewed by our content architects and identifying opportunities for simplification and consolidation

Working with Product Management and Consulting teams to identify areas in the documentation which need to be improved or expanded

Identifying tools that will help improve the quality of our documentation with little to no capital investment or time commitment

We Value Your Feedback

If you're an Oracle employee, you can find the Services Gatekeeper 5.1 docs here.

As always, we’d love to get feedback! If you’ve got content additions or changes, you can post a comment on this blog or send email to cgbu_docfeedback_us_grp@oracle.com.

About

This is a blog from the Oracle Communications Information Development team, led by Cheryl Lander, Sr. Director. She and members of her team from various functions (writers, curriculum developers, and architects) and product lines will share their approach to documentation and curriculum, all with the goal of getting feedback to improve their deliverables. We'd like to thank Joe Sciallo, UCS Tech Writer (former Sun) for pushing us into the social media world. The primary team driving this blog is called "Joe and the Blogettes"; other members include Brenda Roldan (BSS Tech Writer), Jodie Wilford (OSS InfoDev Director), Leif Lourie (SDP Curriculum Developer), and Scott T. Miller (Documentation Architect).